Stevie Nimmo gig in Chichester

Stevie

Published:07:00Thursday 21 May 2015

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Stevie Nimmo heads from Burgundy for a date at Chichester’s Chichester Inn with his trio (Saturday, May 30 at 8.30pm).

France has been home for the past ten years for Stevie, one half of Scotland’s Nimmo Brothers. “I live down near Dijon,” Stevie says. “I have been here for about ten years. I baled out of Scotland a while ago now, but I am back there all the time. People ask me if I miss it, but really I am half the year there anyway. It’s just I really enjoy the laid-back lifestyle here in the countryside with no one around. I get enough of life in the city when I am on tour, and I have never been been one for nightclubs or drink anyway. I just love to come home and chill out.”

Stevie is currently working towards a new album, but has taken the decision to delay it. “It was all seeming too hurried: It’s been delayed by about a year by circumstances. It was a brand-new project, and I was hoping to get it out by the spring, but then everything was going to be really rushed. The guys I was wanting to play on it were playing with other people. It was difficult finding the time to record together. We managed to find five days when all three of us could go in.

“I have rushed things out in the past and regretted it. It has sounded good, and then later you are thinking you wish you had done this and you wish you had done that. I just thought ‘Why mess it up when it is something brand new and you want the time to get it right?’”

It will follow on from his debut solo project The Wynds of Life which came out a few years ago now: “I had been in the business for 20 years. No, more than that. I had been playing with my brother for 20 years, but I had been ill. I had thyroid cancer.

“I had to have a total thyroidectomy that put me out of the game for four or five months. I lost my voice for about three months. The doctors were all saying ‘Yes, it will come back.’ They were saying it could be a week or a month or a year, and eventually it did come back. I have noticed some minor changes to it, but other people say they don’t notice. But definitely my recovery time is longer now after a run of gigs. I really need to make sure I go to bed properly after a run of gigs and don’t stay up talking after a show!

“But at the time, I just had to hang on to the hope my voice would come back, and maybe that comes into The Wynds of Life. A lot of it is highly personal, a lot of it in the lyrics. It just seemed to connect with people, maybe because it was just honest music, maybe because people may have been affected by something similar.

“The next album will be completely different. I have moved on. I don’t have those fears now. The Wynds of Life was in some ways quite negative, but it also felt very positive. I was saying life goes on, the old stiff upper-lip thing. Even when I was diagnosed, I was just thinking ‘Right, what do I do?’ It was a situation out of my control. I just had to do what the doctors told me.”